Abstract
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many businesses had to deal with changing health
orders and state-mandated guidelines as they worked to continue to stay in business and
provide services to their customers. This situation created multiple crises as small
businesses had to adjust quickly, sometimes significantly changing their business models.
For small business leaders with limited resources, crisis planning, management, and
communication may have been difficult. Through this qualitative grounded theory study,
nine employees of Ohio small businesses were interviewed to learn about their
experiences with internal crisis communication during the pandemic and how their
perceptions of those experiences impacted their affective organizational commitment.
Based on this research, I identified that employees had positive and negative perceptions
of their employers’ communication and policy changes during the pandemic. Employees
with positive perceptions of their employers’ communication described experiences that
included high levels of affective commitment and positive communication practices prior
to the pandemic. Employees that perceived their employers’ communication negatively
experienced inconsistencies between the message being communicated and the policies
being developed or felt unsupported or abandoned during the pandemic. To improve
communication and commitment during a crisis, employers should work to build positive
employee-employer relationships through transparent, symmetrical communication,
implementing policies that show compassion towards employees, and building employee
trust.
Keywords: internal crisis communication, COVID-19 pandemic, Ohio small
businesses, employee perceptions